type="main" xml:id="irel12072-abs-0001" <p>The effect of prevailing wage laws on the cost of public construction has been the subject of an ongoing public policy debate. We measure this effect by comparing the public/private construction cost differential for schools built before and after British...</p>

Stochastic frontier regression is used to examine the effect of introducing prevailing wage legislation on public school construction efficiency in British Columbia. Prior to the legislation, public school projects were from 16% to 19% smaller, in terms of square feet, than comparable private...

The effect of the 1992 Fair Wage and Skill Development Policy on construction costs in British Columbia is estimated by an econometric model in which costs are a function of the project's physical characteristics, location, as well as the applicability of the fair wage policy standards....

In California, a leading state in biotech research & development, and bio-pharmaceutical manufacturing, more than 100 establishments in these two related industries employ about 65,000 workers whose average wage exceeds $100,000 per year. On average, about 2000 construction workers build and...

We provide an overview of the workings of the National Science Foundation and the proposal review process, as well as some guidance in writing proposals for funding.

In this paper we derive conditions under which optimal tax rates for addictive goods exceed tax rates for non-addictive consumption goods in an environment where exogenous government spending cannot be nanced with lump sum taxes. Standard static models that consider revenue raising and...

Between 1996 and 2003, a series of amendments were made to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 that gradually increased the tax credit for health insurance purchases by the self- employed from 25 to 100 percent. We study how these changes have in uenced the likelihood that a self-employed person has...

We investigate the effect of speaking Spanish at home as a child on completed schooling and aptitude test scores using data on Hispanics who grew up in the U.S. from the NLSY79. We model the accumulation of traditional human capital and English fluency, leading to the joint determination of...

In an application game, agents decide whether to apply for the prize, and reviewing applica- tions allows the decision maker to learn agent qualifications and award prizes to qualified agents. The decision maker finds reviewing applications costly, and prefers not to review applications from...

A great deal of attention has been paid in the literature to estimating the impacts of training programs. Much less attention has been devoted to how training agencies assign participants to training programs, and to how these allocation decisions vary with agency resources, the initial skill...